AUTUMN

On the first Monday of September, school would start. It was an exciting time. Grass had grown under the swings and around the merry-go-round. School mates had grown taller and their pant legs and dresses seemed to have grown shorter over the summer. This year there was a new teacher and the children wondered what new ways he might have of doing things. Miss Lucy had been there for two years and she was the only teacher Jenny had known. Now Jenny was eight, and the school board had hired Bob, who was barely eighteen, and teaching for the first time. There had been only three applications and they thought a man teacher would be better able to handle some of the older boys. On this first day of school, Bob said they could all go home at ten o”clock as it was Labor Day, a national holiday. He suggested that they might like to go to the watermelon feed by the Solomon River, near Gaylord, seven miles away from their town. He really wanted to visit his girlfriend, who lived in Gaylord. School had never let out for Labor Day before, so Mother and Dad were surprised when their girls came home in the middle of the morning. They decided to attend the watermelon feed. It was a sunny warm day and they dressed in their next best summer clothing and Jenny and Margaret wore their summer poke-shaped bonnets. A large group had gathered under the trees by the river for the watermelon feed. There were political speeches by local and state candidates. A band was seated on a platform, and the tuba player, a rather fat fellow, had bright red hair that looked very strange to Jenny. She pointed him out to Mother and Mother whispered that this was the Grisham boy. Jenny knew that he and his sister had been born without any hair on their bodies and that they had been born in the house where her family lived. That hair was a cheap wig. It seemed to Jenny that she had never seen so many strange looking people gathered in one place. There was a man who bit the heads off live chickens for all who paid to come inside the tent “See the wild man from Borneo,” a barker announced. This must be “Sugar”, a man who was one of the inmates at the county farm, a mile across from the Barnes farm, as the crow flies. Jenny had seen him before. His voice box had been removed and there was something artificial in its place. His voice sounded as though it came from a far away radio . There was a girl a little older than Margaret with very thick lips. She had many nosebleeds, and people said she had her “monthlies” through her nose. Jenny didn’t know what this meant, but from the tone in which they said it, she was afraid to ask. There was a woman whose tongue stuck part way out and she kept chewing it. Folks said she had to bite it to keep from swallowing it and that when she laughed, she sounded like a calf bawling., They said her Mother had been frightened by a cow before she was born. There were swimmers in the roped off swimming area near the river, people of all shapes and sizes. In another part of the river were rafts and small boats.

Mother saw Aunt Eunice, her youngest sister. She and her family lived in Gaylord, where her husband ran the barber shop and they were much respected members of the town. Aunt Eunice knew everyone in Gaylord, of course. Her children, a boy older than Jenny, and a girl four years older than Margaret, were swimming fluently in the river.

“I didn’t know they could swim like that, “ Mother commented. “How did they get to be so good? Aren’t you worried that they will drown?”

“Oh no. They grew up swimming, I’m not worried at all. Besides, there are three life guards.”

The thick slices of dark pink ice cold watermelon tasted delicious. Suddenly the sky became cloudy and the air was a little cooler. A low rumble of thunder could be heard. Mother said that it looked like rain and that she would hunt up Dad because they had better get home, but before she could find him in the crowd, the downpour began. Everyone got soaked, but it was a warm rain and the sun came out and soon dried them People were laughing about getting soaked, but the poke shaped bonnets and Mother’s hat had shrunk and faded and were ruined beyond repair.

Jenny saw her cousin, Susan, and they walked around together for a while. Susan’s Dad was running for state representative that year and he had come to make political speeches. They watched a couple of boys get into a fight. It was getting late and time to get home and milk the cows and feed the chickens, but she wished they could stay a little longer. They got into the Chevy, which looked very clean from the rain. It had been an interesting day, and the family talked over all the interesting things that had happened there, while on their way home, and again at supper.

In September there were tall sunflowers in the fields and along the fence rows, beautiful flowers, but aggressive weeds and not highly prized by the farmers. There was bright golden rod made of many tiny flowers on a stalk or rod, tiny blue and white daisy- like flowers growing wild on the roadside which they picked on the way home from school to be put into vases at home. The sumac leaves would be turning red and gold. Daddy would be drilling the winter wheat. Mother spent long hot days canning peaches, plums, tomatoes, making apple butter and apple jelly, grape butter and grape jelly, peach butter, pickled peaches, watermelon pickles, Dutch pickles sweet pickles. The jars would be cooled and taken to the fruit cellar or “cave,” as they called it where they would be stored in the cupboards and on the shelves for the year. She had already canned mulberries in June and July to be made into pies, and corn from the fields in early August. Later, when the green tomatoes were picked, just before frost, she would make piccalilli from the green tomatoes and cabbage, adding spices. It was stored in large crocks in the pantry.

With October, came cooler weather and golden Indian summer days. Corn would be picked and husked and put into corn cribs. Columbus Day was the first October holiday. Daddy would always say, “In fourteen hundred ninety two. Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” When Jenny was small she thought that Columbus’ sailing was what made the ocean turn blue. Maybe the big ships carried barrels of laundry bluing and dumped it in the ocean like Mother poured bluing from a bottle into the laundry rinse water. At school they sang songs about the Pinta and the Nina and the good old Saint Marie. There was an inspiring poem about Columbus called , “Sail On,” that the upper grade students read when they came to the recitation seats for their reading class and they were sometimes required to memorize it. Halloween meant black paper cats and witches and orange pumpkins and grinning jack--lanterns. Jenny especially liked it when Miss Lucy had decorated the ceiling of the one room schoolhouse with orange and black crepe paper streamers in a canopy. If it were a good pumpkin year, there would be a real jack-o-lantern at home with a candle inside. Everything felt a little spooky on Halloween night. On the day after Halloween, they would arrive at school to find they had been Halloweened. The girl’s toilet would be tipped over and everyone would have to use the boy’s newer firmly anchored “tip proof” toilet for a while.

The first important November event would be Election Day. When Jenny was six, there was a presidential election. Daddy was a strong Republican, as his father had been, and he supported Alf Landon against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Landon had been governor of Kansas and had a balanced budget, but people were hungry throughout the United States and without work. FDR’s programs promised help for the people and he won by a landslide. Landon carried only the states of Maine and Vermont. There was a parody on an Edgar Guest poem that read::

It is easy enough to be pleasant,
When you get all the votes that you want
But the man worth while
Its the man who can smile
When he carries only Maine and Vermont.

November 11 was Armistice Day. Jenny knew that the World War armistice had been signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. When she was in the third grade teacher Bob dismissed school for Armistice Day . The big event was the Kensington barbecue, a few miles to the west. The Labor Day watermelon feed had been so interesting, that Jenny’s family decided to try the barbecue. It was sponsored by the foundry, the industry which kept Kensington alive. It was a pleasant, but crisp day, and huge iron kettles of baked beans and barbequed beef stood in the foundry yard. You picked up a paper plate, a plastic fork and big bun and generous servings of barbecued beef would be put on the bun and baked beans piled onto the plate. There was coffee for the adults. Tasty food for hungry people. Jenny couldn’t eat half of hers. There were programs, games, contests, demonstrations and a general carnival air. Jenny liked the chicken show that was held in one of the buildings, especially the chicken dressed in doll clothes looking very comical.

Thanksgiving. At school they talked about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. Jenny thought they stepped out of the Mayflower onto a big white rock. Pictures of Pilgrims and turkeys adorned the schoolhouse walls. On Thanksgiving Day, Jenny’s family went to dinners at Aunts and Uncles on Mother’s side of the family and sometimes had it at their own place. Everyone brought food which they had cooked that morning and some of the salads had been prepared the day before. The fare would be roast chicken, with all the trimmings, fruit jello salads, and date pudding with whipped cream for dessert. Before dinner,the host would open a bottle of whiskey and pour a small glass for each of the men, who would pretend to act a little tipsy after a few sips . Some would have several glasses and didn’t have to act. The grown ups and very young children who had to be helped and the young adults (teen agers) would eat at the table in the dining room and rest of the children would wait in the kitchen or in the breakfast room, if there was one. It was hard to wait until the rest of the food would be brought out to the kitchen. After dinner Jenny and Margaret and the cousins would slip away to play outside, if the weather was nice, or if not, to the basement of a spare room. While the women cleared the tables and cleared the food, and washed the dishes and chatted, the men would retire to the living room and gather around card tables to play cards. The air would be blue with smoke, as all except Mother’s brother smoked either a pipe or cigarettes. Daddy smoked a pipe. Jenny liked best the Thanksgiving when the country roads were so muddy that no one could get to the Thanksgiving at Uncle John”s and they hitched up the horses to their farm wagons and rode in the bracing open air. It was very festive and like old times and the adults liked it as much as the children. On the Thanksgiving that Jenny was nine, it was an Indian summer day. Dad had dug a new fruit cellar, as the old one had begun to cave in and wasn’t safe any more. The new one was built beneath part of the clothesline. He said it was a more sensible place to go in case of a tornado because it was south of the house instead of northeast. The new cave had a pleasant smell and the walls were whitewashed. Boards were place on top of the cave’s rafters for the roof. Jenny helped Dad pound in the nails into the new piney smelling boards. After this, dirt was piled onto the roof to help it stay cool. Then they got cleaned up to go to Thanksgiving dinner at Uncle George’s. Jenny wore her red plaid dress with the circular skirt. She loved to twirl around in it--it made her feel happy, as though she were floating on air.